Ch-ch-changes

They say that college is supposed to be a chance to push the reset button and start things over. Whoever you were, whatever kind of person people assumed you to be back home has no barring on who you can become. College is an event noteworthy enough to promote change, enormous amounts of change, some times more change than one really wants to make in the beginning. Or at least that was what I had been hearing for the longest time. I got speeches from my mother about “the dangers of alcohol” as if the moment she turned her back I was going to become an instant alcoholic stashing bottles of vodka in my mini fridge and seeking refuge and a guide for my staggering steps in shady mysterious men I had never before met. And much the same was to be had about “the positive correlation between college and drug experimentation” and “experimentation” in general. My pastor started speaking of “making good decisions” and not straying from the path of righteousness. I mean, I understand. Some people needed that, but I was not one of those people. I needed no forewarning. I was the last person to need those little lectures, so much so that I was pretty much pathetic.
I was that girl in high school who was infatuated with books; I couldn’t get enough of them. My nose was most often buried chapters deep in some novel, classic or contemporary, the bigger the book the better. I did my homework like I would burst into flames if I didn’t. It was terrible. When I had nothing else to do, I headed to the library just to soak up the intellectual atmosphere. On weekends, unlike my fellow classmates who would go out and get mind-numbingly inebriated, I would finish up anything had for some reason not finished earlier, read more of those dreadful books, or work pointlessly writing one of my own. The parties I attended usually involved popcorn and cheesy slasher flicks, or music and the pool table in Finn’s garage while gorging ourselves on his mother’s delicious cooking. Yes, I did other things unrelated to paper and pens. I was in high school, not a completely recluse. Though, I swear, I still had one of the most boring social lives of which I had ever heard.
I guess I wasn’t boring, per se. I was practical, but I had a feeling that practicality translated to utter dullness in the eyes of my peers. I had this thing about not letting myself have fun. I was so completely mental about it; purposely depriving my id from seeing the light of day and all of that Freudian junk. I must have because no one else was holding me back and yet I was always so incredibly restrained. It was a gift and a curse, my practicality. Adults found it charming that that I was so “responsible” and “sensible”, but those and their synonyms were words of taboo to me. I was eighteen, an adult in the minds of most. I could vote, kill myself smoking, buy all of the porn I wanted, and lose my entire life’s savings gambling, and yet I was completely un-evolved socially. I was socially retarded. Okay, so not completely. I had gone to some parties, real ones. I had been in the presence of people doing completely stupid rebellious teenage things, but I had never been happy about it. I had always been the bystander never a starring role. I had always wanted to be but I had this strange fear of doing something wrong for no reason. That I wouldn’t be as able to get away with it as everyone else. It would be my luck that the one time I let myself live I would meet with the consequences not yet seen by those seasoned veterans.
I was physically incapable of letting loose, doing things on a whim, seizing the day, like the gene for it was cut out of my genetic make up completely. I had tried to change it, but it felt like just a natural rut in which I constantly found myself. I planned and stressed over every detail of everything I did or planned to do. The cons always appeared as too much of a risk and the pros never outshined the looming darkness that was the unknown consequences to follow. But it was going to be different in college. There were no preconceived expectations of what kind of person I was supposed to be. No one knew me there. No one cared. Whoever I chose to be was going to be the person they’d come to know, not the person I once was. That was history, ancient history. And for once, it could stay that way if it was what I wanted, if I would let it.
Things didn’t always have to go down hill when they changed. Good things could come from change and I had figured that just about any change that I would find myself making would be an upgrade from my former self.

The Smell of Academia

I was on my way to Boston and the car ride and the sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach just reinforced how far away it really was. I still hadn’t figured out exactly why I thought the city so special, special enough to grant me living there. True, it was bigger that Aberdeen, but then again, just about any organized village you pulled out of a hat could fulfill that qualification. I just felt that it was, home to my college, Boston College, the next step towards making something of myself. I understand that I the same degree could be gained elsewhere, but it was the atmosphere that sold me. It was full of the kind of people with who I’d rather spend my time; intellectual, open minded, artistic people, the kind of people that were pretty much a rarity back home.

Other college towns were known to have the same kind of people; Boston just seemed to have more of them. It had the smell of academia and cultured young people all over it and I loved that. You know what they say about small towns; that the people there have small minds, right? Most people try to refute that statement, claiming it to be all lies, but I think I would know considering I had spent my whole life there. It was the truth to some extent. There were people who didn’t fit that description, I mean, I’d like to think of myself as more than small minded, but there were a great majority of people who out shadowed us. They were the kids who refused to speak with proper grammar, flew the confederate flag on their pick-up trucks despite our lack of being anywhere remotely near the south, and made constant racist comments about groups of people of which they had never once met a member. They were the people who never strived for anything better in their lives, only settling for whatever we there right in front of them. I can understand people who can’t afford college or simply don’t believe it to be the right choice for them for whatever reason, but the handful of kids who graduated years before me, yet still sit with their skateboard on main street corner with no jobs and plans to contribute anything to society apart from their graffiti masterpieces, they made me angry whenever I drove by and just saw them sitting there. I don’t consider myself and elitist by any means. I don’t really wish to look down upon people, but I just felt it a waste of whatever potential they may have held. They could have done great things with their lives, but they’ll never know thanks to how much they limited themselves.

I can’t just throw all of the blame on people my own age; adults were just as responsible for small town America’s bad name. I suppose it’s a never ending cycle; close minded kid turns into a close minded adult only to raise more close minded kids if there is no outside factors to influence them otherwise. In fact when I first old my parents that I wanted to move to Boston, my father had a near heart attack. He went on a tangent on how it was the most liberal city imaginable and was greatly responsible for the downfall of America. I promised him that I’d think for myself and vote Republican (oxymoron intended) when the time came just to calm him down a bit. I was pretty much politically neutral, but at least Boston would give me a different perspective to try out for a while and sometimes that’s all a person really needs in order to make up their mind.

I was just different from a lot of the people back home, hence why I was never a big fan of the place. I had some really good friends, obviously, and I wouldn’t have considered them at all like the type of people I described. But on a personal level, I had never really found a solid place where I felt like I fit in; I had different interests, different priorities, than the most of the people around me. Some were the same, but then again I liked reading classic novels and poetry, and watching old movies. I had unintentionally converted Finn to the same ways in regards to that. I liked things reminiscent of days past, back when things were a little more simple; old forgotten clothes tossed from someone’s attic and music played from records rather than cds, or even better, straight from the piano. I had always wondered whether I had been brought into the world at the wrong time or the wrong place. It was a safe assumption that given more people, there were more chances of finding that right place for me and that, that was something for which I had been looking forward for quite some time.

I saw moving away from home as an opportunity, not only to learn all of the academic book related stuff because that was a given, but a time to finally be allowed to be exactly the person I wanted to be, the person who had been trapped inside of me by all of the limitations of home. I was hoping to be happier there. Rather than focusing on all of the things that I could potentially lose, I was going to focus on what all I could gain; not about Finn or losing touch with each other, not about the things that I was leaving behind, but the things that were waiting ahead of me. This thing called optimism; I figured it was worth a try. Look forward, don’t look back.

Wallflower

In saying goodbye to my hometown, I was also saying goodbye to my childhood. Sure, I was beyond ready to leave the horrid town in the dust, but I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my childhood quite yet. I was an adult, true enough, but it felt as if time had flown by to quickly and I had somehow left a few pieces of myself behind. I just wanted a few minutes to breathe and be completely put together before I made the leap out into the great unknown. The whole leaving home idea had sneaked up on me, leaving me completely unprepared.
I never had a picturesque childhood. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exactly good enough to merit writing about it. It was much milder, less adventurous, and much more boring than those had in novels or screen plays. Though my hometown was a setting perfect for such a thing, I never took advantage of it. Though I caught an awful lot of crayfish when I was younger, I never went skipping through cornfields or jumping off a rope swing into the old swimming hole. When I got older, I never hopped in to my boyfriend’s old pick-up truck after he had just suffered an interrogation from my father prior to our first date. I never spent my Saturday nights in dark movie theaters making out with the gentleman beside me, paying attention to the plot unfurling on the silver screen. I never got “grounded” or had the keys to the car taken from me for a week or so thanks to something stupid and irresponsible I did without thinking. I never went looking for trouble; never partook in any wild parties, no drinking out by the lake around a bonfire whilst singing along to someone’s guitar. I was never the prom queen, never the cheerleader with the long blond hair. I had only gone to one school dance, my senior prom, and only because Finn wanted to go but didn’t want to go about the formalities of really asking a girl to accompany him there. I never suffered through the drama of meaningless high school relationships, and never really had my heart broken. I had played the wallflower card. I wasn’t the female lead, but the girl in all black moving around the set furniture and taking care of the props to make everyone else‘s lives easier. I often wondered whether more than ten people would remember me ten years down the road.
In regards to some of that, people have often told me how lucky I am to have by-passed the messy stuff, to sail through without obstacles. But I saw each one of them as little landmarks to growing up, rights of passage, and I had dodged each one of them some how. To me, it felt like to call myself eighteen and an adult was a lie. I was as socially evolved as a twelve-year-old. Maybe that was why I had such as issue with leaving this life and moving to the next one, though I wanted to so badly. It wasn’t time yet. I was starting something new when I was not yet finished with what came before. I was emotionally and mentally grown up, but in the area of hands on experience with life, I had many miles left to tread. I had felt like I had only been really living for the last couple of years of my life and I was just looking to make up for lost time. Sure, normal people whine and complain about how terrible their teen years were and that I was lucky that I never had to learn the hard way. But I didn’t want anyone else to do my growing up for me. I wanted to make my own mistakes. I had focused all of my energy living for the future, getting good grades so I could get into a good college and finally get out of this town and make something of myself, but I never really lived at all for the present. I got what I wanted, I was standing at the very beginning of it all, and yet that still wasn’t enough. I had focused on the destination, not the journey to get there. After all, that was what made a person. It was the most important part and I had forgotten about it. I had taken the Concorde, the quick and safe way, when I should have opted for the commuter, less fussy and more bumps to be felt along the way. In the attempts to prevent myself from making mistakes, I had made the biggest one possible and there was no way to turn around to do it the right way next time.

Here's Looking at You, Kid

He was still there when I awoke the next morning; after all, he was the one to violently sneeze next to me which interrupted such sleep. I didn’t doubt that he was would be when I felt myself drifting off the night before. He was sitting up resting, his back against my headboard. The bed was completely made beneath him which made me think that he must have fallen asleep on top of them for them to be in such pristine condition the next morning.

“Good morning, sunshine.” He spoke with a smile. The way he sat there, doing nothing else, made it seems as if he had been waiting for me to wake, or else creepily watching me as I slept. I bet I was quite a sight to see, my hair sticking up wildly in every direction imaginable and those pesky little pillow fold impressions on my face. I might have even been drooling at one point because that was known to happen every once in a while. That was all certainly something worth watching.

I looked up at my alarm clock which I had forgotten to set. “You’d better leave. My parents will probably be up to pry me out of bed soon. I don’t think they’d appreciate the surprise.” Stupid rules. Stupid assumptions. Stupid parental worries. They were perhaps the upside to leaving.

“No problems, I already came in through the front door.” In other words that meant that he had been awake for a while. He had gotten up in time to leave without being seen and made his presence official by knocking on the front door to be greeted by my father none the wiser. We had invented this method a while ago. By now it went off flawlessly. “Your mom thought it would be okay if I was the one to wake you, but once I got back up here I just couldn’t do it.” I watched as he lay back down, mimicking how I must have slept on my side, but the then his arms moved and playfully captured me as their own. Hopefully I hadn’t happened do that in my sleep too. His fingers found my side, which was a terrible thing to do to a person as ticklish as I happened to be. I tried to stifle my laughter, but it was a lost cause. He quickly stopped to keep me quiet, but still forgot to let me go.

I didn’t want to move. All I wanted to do was lay there, right beside my best friend. This was home to me. This was one of the few things I was going to miss about the place, one of the things that were making this harder that I honestly should have been. Now it wasn’t the packing that made leaving feel so inevitable, but instead, simply getting out of bed. This was the last time I going to be in my childhood bedroom, the last time I’d wake up like this, at least neither for quite some time. As soon as I got out of bed, that was it. The day began and in a matter of hours, not days, I would be gone.

So I laid there with Finn a little while longer and didn’t say a word. His arms kept me from moving even if I wanted to go anywhere. I didn’t care anymore about my parents’ stupid rules anymore. Chances were that they would come up and see it all and I would let them think what they wanted to think and get angry about it. I was moving out, what could they really do anyway? I was going to be in a different state; they would have to give up eventually. “Are you sure you can’t come with us to Boston?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. I just hoped that it would be different if I tried again.

“I’ve got to go on my merry way to school today too…” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Not that I wouldn’t love to spend eight hours trapped in a car with your parents; your father who hates everything about me and your mother who absolutely loves me.”

“My father doesn’t hate you, he hates everyone. Don’t think yourself so special. And I’m sorry about mom, but I’m pretty sure she would jump at the chance to adopt you. I think she’s rather have you than me to call her own.”

“You‘d make her the happiest woman alive if we just up and got married one day.” I was never too fond of the surprisingly plentiful occasions where she had mentioned that every thought in front of us. Despite all that, I had hoped he had overlooked them somehow.

“Yes, but we’d have to tell her about it first. You know, I think she has the whole thing planned already. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger, but dad would positively kill you, you know. There’s no way to make both of them happy simultaneously. I don’t know how they manage to make each other happy, but somehow it works.”

“Kat, just stop talking. You’re ruining it.” He buried his nose in the crook of my neck and laughed doing it, most likely because my wild morning hair was invading his nose.

“Ruining what exactly? The fact that I have to leave is enough.”

“No. Stop thinking about it, not until it’s actually time to go can you mention going anywhere.” I could feel his breath; it was just as bad as the fingers to the side. It made my hair stand on end. I couldn’t help but to twitch and it couldn’t have gone without notice because he continued talking though it was completely unnecessary. “We can do this, right? No worries. Thanksgiving will be here before we know it.”

“Shut it! We aren’t talking about it anymore, remember.”

The vulture-like habits of my parents must have been set a side for the greater good, shockingly, because neither of them had appeared in my doorway with a disappointed expression on their face until I had already willingly gotten myself, and Finn, out of bed. Though a bit later, dad made his first appearance, but for the purpose of carrying boxes out to the car, and perhaps a little bit of spying attached. Then Finn and his constant battle to get on my father’s good side decided he needed to lend a helping hand, but that only served to make the time before we could leave slip away faster. I had so much stuff that even if Finn could have come along there would have been no room for him. There was barely enough room for me to sit comfortably.

I watched as the last box was brought out to the driveway. I could feel the fake smile fall right off my face as the back hatch swung closed. My parents stood motionless, without words, waiting, as if time had stopped for a second. I was surprised really that their impatience hadn’t taken over and shooed me into the car. My dad spoke. “It’s about time we get going,” he tried to word it as nicely as he could. Finn took that as a reason to stand with his arms outstretched in the middle of my driveway with his stupid little grin on his face. I stepped closer, as his stance commanded of me. My arms found their way around his waist in a snake-like fashion, my hold growing tighter on instinct. I wasn’t going to say good bye. We’d already done all that if not in different words. We knew what this could or would mean for us. Saying those two words wouldn’t change anything or make it any better.

He made a move to let go, but I resisted for no other reason other than because I could. He laughed, and I didn’t need to see or hear to know the difference. It was his nervous tick. Chances were, though I couldn’t tell, my face buried at the time, my father was giving his one of those looks again. So I let go, not completely, but just enough. He bent forward and whispered, “Here’s looking at you, Kid.”

It wasn’t the farewell I expected, though something in me probably should have. That kid knew what made me happy more than I did. I spoke back in a low voice, “I wish I didn’t love you so much.” Hopefully he caught the reference; I used my best Ingrid Bergman accent, but my best wasn’t particularly good. And even if he didn’t remember it, it was useless to apologize for stating the truth. Quoting or not, I meant the words the same.

I let go, finally. I let my arms fall lifelessly at my sides as if every bit of energy they once possessed had been expended all at once. I opened the car door and got in. As I struggled to find the seatbelt buckle beneath all the boxes and bedding, he pushed the door shut. As the car moved down the driveway, I could see him waving and I did the same. Once we reached the road, he gave up and headed next door only to leave shortly in the same way.

If you were to have asked me month earlier about that very moment months before it came my way, I would have been more than happy to see the lack luster scenery pass by my car window knowing that I would finally have a chance to live somewhere, anywhere, else. I hated the location, but it was the people and things that made the place bearable for eighteen year that made me question whether moving all the way to Boston was going to be my biggest mistake to date.